Swing State Voters Fumigated the MAGA Pests Who Were Gnawing the Democratic Woodwork

By DICK POLMAN

On the eve of the midterms, when President Biden reminded Americans that democracy itself was on the ballot, various pundits scoffed that he was out of touch. They said that most people didn’t care about such trifles. They yawned when he warned that MAGA candidates in swing states were intent on taking control of the vote-counting process and making plans to rig future elections; in Biden’s supposedly wasted words, “This is a path to chaos. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful, and it’s un-American.”

Well, it turned out that a sufficient share of voters either heeded his message, or were instinctively wise enough on their own to protect democracy – because in our key swing states, every single MAGAt running for the job of election overseer was tossed into the trash. Put your hands together for the better angels of human nature.

A nutcase named Jim Marchant was running to become Nevada’s secretary of state, promising to “overhaul the fraudulent election system in Nevada,” despite zero evidence of a fraudulent election system in Nevada. He vowed last month that he and his fellow MAGAt secretary of state candidates “are going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.” But, as Homer Simpson likes to say, “D’oh!” Marchant lost his race.

In Arizona, a conspiracy freak named Mark Finchem – a Jan. 6 attendee, a vocal disseminator of “stop the steal” lies – ran for secretary of state on the Republican ticket, with Trump’s full endorsement (the grifter said that Finchem was “a true warrior … willing to say what few others had the courage to say”). But in the midterms, Finchem lost as well. (And the boss he’ll never have, fellow election-denier Kari Lake, also lost her gubernatorial race – an outcome that, by all evidence, may prompt her to spontaneously combust.)

In Michigan, a kook named Kristina Karamo got the Republican nod to run for secretary of state despite (or because of) her insistent claims that Biden’s 2020 Michigan win was fraudulent. She repeatedly cited evidence that didn’t exist in the real world, she said Biden’s statewide victory was contrived to aid the Democrats’ “satanic agenda”… no wonder Trump endorsed her. But in the midterm voting, Karamo was buried by 14 points.

In Pennsylvania, the election overseer is appointed by the governor. MAGA gubernatorial hopeful Doug Mastriano didn’t mince words: “I get to appoint the secretary of state, who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections … I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen.” In his dreams, because Mastriano was decimated on election night.

In New Mexico, which has lately tilted blue, yet another loon ran for secretary of state. Audrey Trujillo declared that the entire 2020 election was “a huge coup to unseat a president,” and vowed to rig 2024 for Trump on her local patch by eliminating early voting and curbing the right to vote by mai. She too was wiped out on midterm night, by 12 points.

And let’s not forget what happened in Georgia’s Republican primary last May, when Trump’s favored candidate failed in spectacular fashion to oust Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state who’d stubbornly certified Biden’s statewide win. (Trump, you may recall, had commanded that Brad “find” 11,000 MAGA votes, enough to overturn Biden’s win.) Trump found a compliant election denier to run in the primary, but Brad beat the guy by 18 points. Then, Nov. 8, Brad handily won re-election; apparently the voters didn’t mind that Brad has testified to the grand jury probing Trump’s conduct in Georgia.

So when the chips were down, voters stepped up to stop the pests who were gnawing our institutional woodwork. Maybe it’s too grandiose to suggest that the voters acted to save democracy. Maybe Cisco Aguilar, the winning secretary of state candidate in Nevada, got it right the other day: “People are tired of chaos. They want stability. They want normalcy. They want somebody who’s going to be an adult.”

I can live with that.

But David French, an attorney and conservative commentator, went a bit further. Voters were given the opportunity to reject “some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history” – and they did so. In short, “they most definitely moved back towards reason, and our most basic moral norms.”

I like that better.

Indeed, redstate.com, the conservative media outlet, is calling the GOP’s midterms “an unmitigated disaster.”

I like that even more.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2022

Populist.com